In the mid 1700s, the north is a place of centuries-long tradition; ingrained, institutional prejudice; and wilder, darker magic. It is still reeling from the passage and amendment of the Statute of Secrecy half a century earlier. The Durmstrang Institute is a school that trains its students to excel in this harsher environment and, in doing so, to make the hard choices that make that possible. The lessons can sometimes be dangerous; ignoring them is always deadly.
Join Svanrun and Casimir during their first year at Durmstrang, where grueling classes, new friends, and tantalising secrets await.
Beware, though – there are whispers of a new threat that seeks to weaponise the fault lines running through this society to its own ends, and what exactly those ends are is a mystery in itself.
For the sake of formatting, I am using a work skin. You can easily disable this by clicking “Hide Creator’s Style” at the top of the page, but I think the skin (and the formatting it allows) improves the experience of this story on the website.
Mind the tags; this series leans heavily into blood prejudice, and many principal characters will, especially in the beginning, be uncritical thereof.
An effort was made to be faithful to and expand upon historical details and principles of magic explicitly established by the novels – details from the rest of the “Wizarding World” have been variably incorporated or ignored.
Myt nauwer noet de man entspranck.
He sprack: »is dyt nu myn danck,
Dat ick dy halp vth dyneme vordreet,
Dar du my sworest eynen düren eyt,
Dattu my nummer woldest schaden?«
De slange sprack: »ik byn beladen
Myt hunger, de my brynget dar to.
Ick mach yd vorantworden, dat ik do;
Lyues noet bryckt dat recht.«
⸻ Excerpt from Reynke de Vos, Anonymous (Lübeck, 1498)